Boarding at the Speed of Flight Team 2053

Executive Summary After mathematically analyzing the aircraft boarding problem, our modeling group would like to present our conclusions, strategies, and recommendations to the airline industry. We examined the mathematical effects of waiting in line to board, sending in different groupings of seat assignments, and the interaction between various components of the boarding process to determine the time required to board an aircraft. We developed a detailed simulation methodology to test our ideas and to quantify the differences between boarding strategies. Our simulation models all of the critical factors at play in a boarding scenario, and is easily modified to support different plane dimensions and interior configurations as well any assortment of passenger characteristics depending on average demographics and other statistics. We believe that further collaboration with your company and access to your internal business data would provide us with the capability to more accurately determine results and to tune our parameters specific to your airline. Our analysis began by determining what factors impact boarding speed the most across all boarding algorithms. Our conclusions are presented in the list below along with strategies that can be implemented to mitigate their impact: • Passenger entry speed: The faster passengers enter the plane, the faster it boards. This means flight check-in procedure (ticket checking) should be optimized to ensure the correct number of gate agents are present. This is particularly important on large planes with multiple aisles or levels. Flight attendants should be stationed at critical junctions (such as entrances to aisles in a multi-aisle plane) to direct each passenger to the correct row and thereby maintain throughput. • Baggage stowage time: The faster passengers put their bags away and sit down, the faster the plane boards. The impact of storage time can be mitigated by changing or enforcing carry-on baggage limits and by having flight attendants assist passengers with particularly large bags that they cannot easily lift. Another possibility to consider is a redesign of the overhead bins to make them more easy to load. For airlines interested in further decreasing average boarding time we have fur-1 Team 2053 2 of 30 ther analyzed the merits of different boarding algorithms. Through our simulations we have developed a generic classification of boarding methods: • Best No assigned seats • Better Outside in boarding • Mediocre Back to front We understand that the proposition of no assigned seats may be problematic from a customer …